Drama Teachers: How do you market your shows?

Episode 177: Drama Teachers: How do you market your shows?

If you want to build the audience that comes to see your shows, that means you have to do some marketing. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some are too busy trying to put the show together. Candice McMath talks about combining new marketing techniques with traditional in this week’s podcast. What worked? What didn’t How much was her budget?

Tune in to find out.

Show Notes

• Shuddersome Poster
• Shuddersome Trailer
• Little Theatre of Tuscarawas County
• Shuddersome: Tales of Poe

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Drama Teacher Podcast brought to you by Theatrefolk – the Drama teacher resource company.

I’m Lindsay Price.

Hello! I hope you’re well. Thanks for listening!

This is Episode 177 and you can find any links to this episode in the show notes which are at Theatrefolk.com/episode177.

Today, we are talking marketing. Ah! Marketing!

Is that something you use to promote your shows to the community? Do you like marketing? Is it a dirty word? “Ugh! I hate marketing!” Is it something you never think about because, well, you don’t have time? You’re busy trying to put a show together!

If you want to build the reach of your program and build the audience that comes to your shows, marketing is a must.

We’re in a new age of marketing here in the good old 21st Century. Some of those old techniques, they don’t work as well anymore. But we’re so saturated online. How effective are new techniques?

We’re going to talk with Candice McMath and her marketing strategy when she directed my play, Shuddersome: Tales of Poe.

Let’s get to it.

LINDSAY: All right, hello, everybody!

I am sitting here with Candice McMath.

Hello, Candice!

CANDICE: Hey, Lindsay! How are you doing?

LINDSAY: I am excellent! How are you today?

CANDICE: I’m great!

LINDSAY: Perfect.

So, tell everybody where in the world you are.

CANDICE: I am in New Philadelphia, Ohio, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere. But, if you draw a triangle between Cleveland, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I’m right in the middle of it.

LINDSAY: That is perfect! I love knowing where everybody is who we talk to, but I’m telling you, at least seven times out of ten, a name of a place is said and I’m like, “Well, I don’t know where that is.” But I’m a plain old visual learner so I am picturing the triangle and it’s given me exactly what I need.

Candice, you wear a lot of hats.

CANDICE: I do.

LINDSAY: I know you as a director. You directed a production of my play Shuddersome – which is half of the reason that Candice is here – but you also do graphic design and posters. What is your true love?

CANDICE: Well, my true love is art. I’ve always said that I am an artist, a teacher, and a maker of things. So, we didn’t have a whole lot of money when I was growing up. And so, I spent a lot of time entertaining myself and just, if there was something laying around that I could duct tape to something else or hot glue feathers on it, then I did it. So, that love of just creating things and being artistic translated into me getting a bachelor of arts in college. I majored in art because I loved it and business so I could eat.

LINDSAY: So, you’re smart and creative.

CANDICE: Well, I try to walk the line between the two.

LINDSAY: Where does theatre fit into this puzzle for you?

CANDICE: Well, theatre fits in for me the way I think it fits in for all of us who love to do theatre. There’s a part of me that just loves to show off and being able to do what I love and sing and dance or perform onstage for 90 minutes to 2 hours and just get to play dress-up and escape and entertain people is one thing I’ve always really loved. It’s just a really fun escapism to be able to partake in.

You know, at the end of the day, you go back to your real life, but there’s a camaraderie and just a really fun exploration of art that can go on at theatre that I just always try to keep in my life.

LINDSAY: I totally get the whole notion of being onstage and what theatre really speaks to a lot of people about being onstage. But you also direct. What does directing do for you?

CANDICE: I do. I should probably back up and say I have assistant directed a lot which plays on my strengths of being really organized and I love to help other people achieve their visions. So, I spent a good three and a half to four years assistant directing. And then, I got to a point where I wanted to create my own vision – like, I wanted to be the one calling the shots, I wanted to be the one in-charge, and I wanted to be the one that had that creative control to present something that was from my brain and my vision and put that up on the stage.

So, I submitted your show, Shuddersome: Tales of Poe, to my local community theatre and they selected it for the black box experimental slot for the show which was fantastic. It was my first show. It was the perfect size.

What I found out at the end of directing was that it was a far more collaborative event than I anticipated. I did not expect for the cast and the crew to fall in love with your show as much as I did and they absolutely gave their all to it. They told me, “You know what, Candice, we know this is your baby and we are not going to let you down and we’re not going to let her down.” Even at this point, I get a little verklempt trying to talk about it. Like, they were just stellar and the show ended up being even better than I could have ever imagined because everybody was able to contribute to it.

LINDSAY: You know, it really sounds like your experience was the ultimate in what community theatre is supposed to be, right?

CANDICE: Yeah.

LINDSAY: It is that community feeling.

CANDICE: Yeah, it really was, because I’ve done community theatre for ten to twelve years now so I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. This was definitely the best show experience I have ever had. They were just wonderful and the show was successful and I got to put my vision onstage and it was just all-around a wonderful, wonderful experience.

LINDSAY: I’m so happy to have played a little part in that!

CANDICE: Yeah, you did!

LINDSAY: Oh, and I’m so excited also that that was your first show because, let me tell you, you came across as somebody who was, well, your organizational skills were very present.

CANDICE: Oh, thank you!

LINDSAY: It just felt like you’d been doing it for a lifelong time.

CANDICE: Oh, wow! Thank you!

LINDSAY: Oh, you’re welcome!

CANDICE: The cast was also really excited that you guys chose three of our production photos to put on the gallery page for Shuddersome. They were so excited on Facebook. They couldn’t believe it. They wanted me to tell you, ‘Thank you for picking us!”

LINDSAY: Oh, man, well, thank you! It’s a total two-way street. It’s like you guys stepped up to the plate and it was an easy, easy decision.

CANDICE: Well, thanks!

LINDSAY: Okay! So, let’s get into why we’re really here.

We’re here and we’re going to talk about marketing and also marketing and publicity of a show. This is the reason I wanted to have Candice on this podcast because she just kept putting so many cool things, telling me so many cool things about different marketing and publicity ideas that you were trying and that you had and I just know that there are so many folks who struggle in the area of marketing. You know, I know that some people, the community doesn’t come to the high school shows or that it’s mostly friends and family or they have competition from other schools. I just thought, “What a great conversation we could have about what you did for your marketing and what was successful!” and maybe things that you might do differently next time.

The first thing that I’d like to start with from your director’s hat is just to talk about because I’m thinking that your vision for the show played a part in your vision for your marketing. Is that fair to say?

CANDICE: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I do want to break in and say that part of the reason that it was so easy for me to get excited about marketing was, when we purchased the rights for your show, you had sent an email to us, basically inviting us into a dialogue with you. You were excited that we were doing the show. I was excited to share information. Because you sent that email, it really opened up a lot of excitement on the production staff and, I mean, it just gave us the greenlight. We were raring to go from day one. So, that worked out really well for us.

LINDSAY: That’s really cool. I’m always – just on a complete tangent – I’m thrilled when anybody does one of my shows. I am tickled. I’m like, “Really? Awesome! That is the best!” Whenever I send those emails, I know it’s very hard to convey tone in an email but, when I say, “I’m glad! Thank you for choosing my show! I think it’s great!” That’s really nice to hear – that that was a really nice jumpstart.

All of you out there, if you can contact your playwright and…

CANDICE: Just say thank you because they’re wonderful.

LINDSAY: Your vision, what was your vision for Shuddersome?

CANDICE: Well, my vision for Shuddersome was I knew that it would probably be a tough sell in the area where I am. We’re in Appalachia, Ohio. They prefer comedies and musicals. Shuddersome is definitely on the higher end of theatre.

We have a saying at the community theatre, for any show that we do, you know, it’s not art. It’s just a comedy. It’s just a musical. This is not art. But, when I got Shuddersome, I’m like, “I can do art! This is art! We can art the heck out of this!” And so, I knew I wanted it to be black box. We had to keep the set basically stripped down to nothing. Since we were in the experimental slot, we rehearsed offsite for all but four days before the show opened. We got the theatre four days to put up the lights and fix all the staging stuff and then actually do the show for paying customers. I knew that it had to be simple, set-wise, in order to enable that.

The same thing with publicity. Because this was such a different show than what the community around here has seen, I want to say the last drama that was done at that community theatre was at least a year ago, if not more, and it was The Crucible. You know, we’re kind of up against some heavy-hitters when it comes to serious stage dramas.

Sometimes, my brain gets ahead of my mouth. I’m going to have to look at my notes here.

LINDSAY: You and me, both.

CANDICE: Traditionally, our theatre uses five different methods of marketing. They have posters that go up in the community; there are different newsletter flyers or radiograms that go out that they put show advertisements in; we have two big banners that get put up in the main communities that surround us; there’s some radio spots and we do some radio interviews with the cast; and then, there’s the newspaper ads and then a couple of articles leading up to the production that explains the cast or a little interview with the director or there’s some behind-the-scenes stuff if there’s something interesting that’s gone on with the show. They’ll write an article about it and, one of the newspapers, we usually send a reviewer to the first weekend and then they’ll run their review prior to the second weekend of shows.

LINDSAY: So, very traditional?

How old is the community theatre?

CANDICE: It is at least fifty years old but I know it’s older than that. I’m not sure when they started but we’ve been in our current building for fifty years and they just celebrated their 250th show two seasons ago.

LINDSAY: Right. So, this is marketing that has always worked for them?

CANDICE: Exactly, yeah. This is the tried and true. This is the routine. This is what we do. This is how this works.

I knew, going into it, that just that was not going to be enough. So, I tried three new methods with my show that were all fairly cheap, actually. Together, the package cost under $200 but you could do it cheaper if you needed to. Each one of them paid out in different ways.

The first thing that I did, knowing that it was a Poe show, knowing that the schools teach Edgar Allan Poe, I did two bulk mailings to our local school districts. We have ten different school districts that we can reach with the little theatre of Tuscarawas County. You know, there’s a bunch of little ones spread out all around but we have community theatre members that are in touch with those schools. They either help with their drama programs or they have kids that go there so we have a lot of contact there but I don’t feel that our theatre has really leveraged that as well as we could have.

We tried it with Crucible, got a little bit of response. And so, I wanted to start building a relationship and some rapport with the schools to say, “This is what we’re doing.” I sent two bulk mailings. Because my show was present last week of August, first week of September, it was in a really tricky timeslot to market to schools because everybody went on summer break at the end of May and they just got back the week that the show opened. So, I sent out a mailing in April to the principals, the middle school language arts teachers, the high school language arts teachers, and the drama departments when I knew who they were to those ten school districts and I said, “Listen, this is the show I’m going to be directing next fall. It has all of these Edgar Allan Poe stories. Please, consider coming. We can offer you a discount for student tickets. We just want you to know this is coming up.”

I also in that letter put a plug-in for our summer theatre camps that we have. We have a week for high school kids and then a week for elementary to middle school kids – that they can come into the theatre, see how all the official theatre stuff works, and they get to work with one of our drama educators and it’s a really great program. Every year, the enrolment has increased on it and I want to say, this year, they got upwards of 60 kids for both camps.

LINDSAY: Awesome.

CANDICE: I’m not quite sure.

We did that marketing piece in April. And then, at the middle of August, two weeks before we opened, I did another mailing to the same schools and the same people sending student ticket vouchers that the kids could bring in with a can of food and they could get a discount of $5.00 off their ticket. Again, just reminding them of the show times. With that mailing too, I also included the list of the shows that were in Shuddersome and then two sample lesson plans that the teachers could use – incorporating theatre into their classroom or writing a theatre review and just to help spark interest, maybe this will help some teachers and their kids.

The good thing was, four of the school districts, I personally knew the English teachers there and so they gave their kids extra credit if they came to see the show.

LINDSAY: I want to highlight a couple of things in here that I really like.

First of all, you weren’t one and done with trying to create a new relationship with the school boards.

CANDICE: Oh, exactly.

LINDSAY: This is something and mail can be very tricky in terms of whether or not it’s actually going to get into the hands of the people that you want it to. I think it’s really awesome that (a) you did two different mailings and (b) that second mailing didn’t just say, “Hey, you guys call us and we’ll give you vouchers.” “Here are the vouchers! Give them to your students. All they have to do is XYZ.” And then, the lessons plans, I think that is the brilliant thing and I think that’s something that, if you want your community to come, what is going to get them in the door, and I think, with schools, lesson plans are it.

CANDICE: Exactly. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for them to come see the show and benefit from it. So, taking out the excuses of “I don’t have the stuff.” You know, “Here’s the vouchers. Here’s the lesson plans that you can start with.” I think that both of the lesson plans included which state standards they met and so that was really easily highlighted so they could see it made Standard 6A, 6B, yadda yadda yadda.

I totally agree with you – building the relationship, you have to reach out multiple times.

I heard once that it’s anywhere between five and seven interactions before an ad is actually effective for a company. So, that was why I definitely wanted to do two mailings. I probably would have done more but, again, with the timeframe that I had, school was out for the summer from June through the beginning of August so it was kind of pointless to try to keep sending things to people who weren’t there.

LINDSAY: No, and it’s interesting. In terms of a whole marketing idea of we think that more is a bombardment but five to seven is exactly right. When we do email marketing campaigns, it’s five to seven emails that go out within a week’s time and the percentage of people who contact us and say, “Stop spamming us!” or whatever is so small. Now, obviously, there are some people who don’t open those emails and blah blah blah, but that’s something too when you’re thinking about marketing, I don’t think about bothering them. You’re not bothering them. We’re in that world now.

CANDICE: Exactly, and I had to get over that fear of I was bothering people by advertising my show. It was a learning experience for that.

The student discount tickets, like I said, we offered $5.00 off for the theatre. That cost me the paper to print the tickets on and the postage to send the mailings. You know, I think it ended up being around $45.00 total to put that whole package together and send it out. It ended up getting us 34 student tickets which I would have been happy with anything over five. I was really pleased with 34. And then, we tied it to a food drive for our local food pantry. So, they had to bring the student ticket voucher and a canned food item. They donated 65 cans of food. So, most of the kids brought in more than what they needed which was pretty awesome.

LINDSAY: That is pretty awesome.

Now, hopefully, that’s a start and you’ve put something in place so the next person who’s going to come and maybe try and do that, the little theatre’s name might be on people’s minds.

CANDICE: Exactly.

LINDSAY: That’s what it’s all about, too. Sometimes, people get frustrated that the first time they try something out of the gate, that it isn’t this amazing success. I think that’s the other thing – it takes time for people to remember your name.

CANDICE: Exactly. Well, like I said, we did The Crucible first and then they did a production of Charlotte’s Web that also went out and they did some scenes from the show in the elementary schools in the area and that worked out really well for them. And so, that show hit the elementary crowd. I’m going in and trying to reach the middle school and high school crowd. So, I’m hoping that, by doing all of those touches, that it gets the students more involved in the theatre and their community.

LINDSAY: Awesome. All right, that was number one.

CANDICE: That was number one.

LINDSAY: Number two?

CANDICE: Number two was the use of social media and paid advertisement.

What we did was I contacted our marketing chair for the theatre. I said, “Hey, Kate! I need you to do some Facebook advertising for me.” She spent $100 for the run of the show to run the paid advertisements on Facebook. That led to 135 ticket purchases. That’s not to say that it was just one ticket each time. It could have been somebody going in to buy four tickets. But those ads led to 135 clicks that ended up being ticket sales.

LINDSAY: That’s awesome! That’s great!

CANDICE: I thought it was pretty good. We’ve had a lot of success with that with some of the past shows so that’s going to become more mainstream in the theatre’s marketing plan, I think.

LINDSAY: Well, the thing to think about with social media is where are your customers’ eyeballs? Where are they? At Theatrefolk, our customers are on Facebook. That’s where a lot of them go, a lot of them live – put a little tent there, no. And so, Facebook marketing can be a really excellent tool and I think people need to get over the fact that Facebook isn’t that whole notion that the organic reach isn’t as much as it used to be and, “Oh, we’re not getting in people’s feeds. Why do we have to pay for it?” Because it works!

CANDICE: Exactly! Exactly, it does work.

The paid advertising, I want to say, because it was with our Facebook page, it also tied to the theatre’s Instagram account.

LINDSAY: Yes.

CANDICE: But I am a visual thinker, I’m a visual learner, so I Instagrammed just so much with this show. If you look at my Instagram feed from about April through the end of September, it was all Shuddersome and that was all it was. So, I had a contest among the cast to create a show hashtag. And so, the hashtags that they submitted to me with all the different puns on the name Poe was just hilarious. It was like the best part of the first week of rehearsals.

We decided on the hashtag #themoreyoupoe. And so, for everything that I posted or that the kids posted, I mean, you could put a lot of other hashtags with it but #themoreyoupoe was the one that we stuck with for everything. And so, they would take pictures in the community with posters, they staged photos, they had big hashtags signs that had #themoreyoupoe on it, and we’d do just all sorts of crazy stuff and then they posted it on their own social media so that reached all of their friends. That was a huge amount of fun.

What we did with that then was, afterwards, I gave out what we called the Edgar Awards. So, I got little Oscar statuettes and we came up with all these different categories to award cast members. There was Best Hashtag, Best Stage Photo, Best Vine Video. We had eight different awards that we gave out throughout the production. I awarded one a night during the company meeting and it was a nice way to tie a bow on the entire experience. They got an Oscar statuette and then a $5.00 gift card to Dairy Queen.

LINDSAY: What a great incentive, right? I love the idea of getting your cast to create the hashtag and then also acknowledging it. What a great thing to do during a company meeting – to give out Oscars, why not?

CANDICE: Yeah, it was super fun and they actually got really competitive about it. I was kind of surprised. I figured they would think, “Oh, yeah, this is kind of silly. We’ll do it, maybe,” but, oh, no, they were kind of cutthroat about it. So, that worked out really well.

LINDSAY: Awesome.

CANDICE: The last thing that I did was actually my favorite one. They were community previews. For copyright reasons, we knew we couldn’t do parts of the show without charging tickets for it. Luckily for us, Poe has so many works that weren’t in your play.

So, we advertised different Poe entry readings at community venues. We did two at different libraries and then we did one at our local arts centre. And so, it was on a volunteer basis by the cast. They signed up if they wanted to come and we read, I think it was five different poems of Edgar Allan Poe that weren’t in the show and then we would read a short story.

One night, we did excerpts from Pit and the Pendulum; one night, we did excerpts from Cask of Amontillado; one night, we did The Black Cat. And so, we would invite the community in and say, “You know, this is a taste of what you could see at our show. We have other things that you’re not going to see here tonight that will be at the theatre so come out and see us.” Those were attended. The first one had five people, the second one had 25, and the last one had 30.

So, it was a lot of fun to be able to market with the community, work with the libraries, talk with the arts centre, and just really start to create some dialogue about the different types of shows that we can do with the theatre.

LINDSAY: That’s awesome. Also, it’s very helpful that Poe has so much other stuff because this is the atmosphere or this is the mood, this is the tone, but you’re not giving away the show.

CANDICE: Exactly.

LINDSAY: Ah! I love that! That was one of my favorite ones as well, even just as a bystander just looking at the emails that you sent.

So, there’s a couple of other things that you’ve done, too. You did a trailer?

CANDICE: Yes.

LINDSAY: Where did that live and how did you use that?

CANDICE: What that did was it lived on, well, my Facebook page and then you guys so nicely shared it which was pretty exciting for me. I’m like, “Hey, look! I’m getting legitimate street cred here. Something I created is being shared by a publisher. This is cool!” And then, our marketing chair for the little theatre shared it on the theatre’s social media. It was on the theatre’s web page for the show, it was on the page where you could buy tickets. Again, it was just I wanted something to kind of spark some interest, set that creepy tone. It’s not something that you see a lot of with the shows but you see movie trailers all the time. So, why not capitalize on that?

I called it the nervous trailer which was the opening line from Telltale Heart and then we also did one that was cast rehearsal footage. It was them doing their theatre exercises when we were really working on the Shudder movement and like the creepy zombie stalking but they all don’t look like they came from The Walking Dead kind of thing. I was able to match up those theatre game exercises with some other underscore music that we used in the production that again just showed the creepy tone, showed what was coming, and drummed up excitement for the show.

LINDSAY: Well, I think that’s something that everyone can capitalize on in terms of marketing. It’s like you have you rehearse, right? That whole notion of what’s going on behind the scenes of a play, I think everybody is interested in those kinds of sneak peeks.

CANDICE: Oh, yeah, I am sure a nerd for stuff like that. I love behind the scenes features. I always end up watching those before I watch the movie when I buy the DVD. So, I wanted to put a little bit of that in with the show, too.

LINDSAY: Awesome.

Okay. So, a whole bunch of different types of marketing going on here – using different mediums, using a mix of traditional and a mix of stuff you’ve never done before. As we’re reaching the end here, let’s go with I think that you’re going to say – just because you’ve already said it, I’m not like a brain surgeon here – the poetry readings, you felt you liked that the most in terms of your marketing?

CANDICE: Yeah, that was my favorite – partially because the material that we got to share wasn’t in the show. So, I got to expose more people to more Edgar Allan Poe than they might see originally, specifically, we included Annabel Lee which was actually one of the cast’s favorite poem and they were very sad it wasn’t in the actual production. So, we got to perform that.

It was also really cool to be able to go out into the community and represent the theatre and show what we do in a way that they haven’t really seen before. You know, sometimes, we’re in the community asking for donations for lighting or we’re representing another charity where the theatre will go and participate in Relay for Life. But it’s very rare that we’re actually in the community, still doing theatre activities, but we’re not at the theatre, if that makes any sense.

LINDSAY: It makes total sense! I think that’s something to put out there for people listening, too. If you want the community to come to your shows, the community has to know who you are and know who you are and know what you do and to get out into the community really is the only way to make people aware of you.

CANDICE: Exactly. They’re not going to necessarily come in on their own but it’s a lot easier if you make an actual connection face to face with somebody or if you’re able to kind of test the waters and watch a little bit and say, “Oh, I really like that! I would like to come and go see the full show.”

LINDSAY: Yeah, totally.

What would you say if there was something that you tried that you would do differently? What would you say?

CANDICE: I would push the community previews a bit further, actually. We were able to offer a door prize raffle at the community previews so we gave away two tickets to the show. For people who showed up, it was a door prize drawing. The library, one of the libraries actually went way above and beyond and they put in other prizes for the door prize. So, we were giving out mugs and blankets and all sorts of cool stuff at that one. So, that was great. But I would try to do them in places where you might not think the theatre would go.

For instance, we had a community preview lined up with the local winery and were going to do a poetry reading that night and there was a scheduling conflict where there was a band playing the same night we were supposed to be there. So, we backed of and said, “That’s okay. We’ll try it another time.”

There was a couple of different coffee houses that again do open mic nights that I wish I would have had the foresight in planning the show to allow some more time to do some more community previews. But it was my first show. We had kind of a shortened rehearsal period. We had six weeks to put the show together, four days in the theatre, and then eight days over two weeks to actually perform the show.

So, I think, if I had a full rehearsal timeslot, you know, I would do some more interesting things with the community previews with maybe sending the group that did the poetry readings into a school if they would let us come into English classes and read a couple of poems for them and answer some questions about the show. That would have been really cool to have been able to try.

LINDSAY: Awesome. Awesome!

What would you say to someone who is terrified of marketing and is not quite sure where to start? What piece of advice would you give to someone as a good first step for marketing their show?

CANDICE: I would definitely make sure that you connect with somebody on your production staff that is an extrovert because I am not and I had all these ideas. I knew what I wanted to do and the thought of actually making all the phone calls terrified me. So, I connected with the guy who actually ended up being my lighting designer, is wonderful at marketing, and is a great people person. I explained to him what I wanted and that I just let him go do it and it worked out fabulously.

So, don’t let your own personal fears stop you from doing something. Community theatre is community for a reason. Form your community and play off the strengths of the other people that you work with.

LINDSAY: Awesome! Fantastic!

Candice, thank you so much for talking to me today. I knew that this was going to be a fascinating look at something that is really important to get your show in front of as many people as you want. You do all that hard work and, you know, we need that audience, right?

CANDICE: Exactly, yes!

LINDSAY: That’s what we need.

Thank you so much for talking to me today!

CANDICE: Thank you for calling me! I was really excited that you wanted to speak. So, thanks!

LINDSAY: Thank you, Candice!

Before we go, let’s do some THEATREFOLK NEWS!

It’s a play feature! It’s a play feature! It’s time to feature a play!

So, we’ve been talking about marketing Shuddersome: Tales of Poe. Let’s talk about Shuddersome: Tales of Poe – the play!

Edgar Allan Poe wrote some wonderful, creepy, scary, macabre stories and poems. They are the source material brought to life in this theatrical adaptation – this pretty great theatrical adaptation, if I do say so myself. I’m going to say so myself! I think it’s great!

This play was actually a huge challenge to write. Poe writes in a way where it’s the single reader’s imagination that takes charge in its interaction, in their interactions with the story and, in a play, we can’t be inside everybody’s head at the same time. We want the staging and the theatricality to do the work as opposed to what Edgar is doing. That’s not the same technique and why I wanted to make the adaptation definitely a play and not a story. At the same time, you know, I had to stay true to Poe’s intention and that was the challenge of the year when I was writing that play and I’m really happy with the outcome. You know, it’s creep and scary and a little macabre.

So, in this adaptation are included some really well-known stories – The Telltale Heart, The Raven, The Mask of the Red Death, and more. You can get a copy of Shuddersome: Tales of Poe by going to Theatrefolk.com or by clicking the link in the show notes which is Theatrefolk.com/episode177.

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And that’s where we’re going to end. Take care, my friends. Take care.

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Music credit:”Ave” by Alex (feat. Morusque) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.